Hamburg attacker was known Islamist but not jihadist

[Ed. – Hold on there. He ‘did not pose a danger to others’? Does that include the eight people he stabbed?]

A man who stabbed one person to death and wounded seven others in Hamburg Friday was known to German security services as an Islamist with psychological problems, officials said Saturday.

However, the security services had concluded the man — a 26-year-old Palestinian born in the United Arab Emirates whose asylum application had been rejected — was not a jihadist and did not pose a danger to others, officials told a press briefing in the northern German city.

The man seized a knife in a supermarket in the Barmbek district of the city Friday afternoon and began stabbing people in the shop, officials said. He then left the supermarket and continued to attack people before being stopped by passers-by.

Andy Grote, Hamburg’s state interior minister, said the man had been assessed to be “an Islamist and was recorded as such in the appropriate systems, not as a jihadist but as an Islamist.”

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